This game is hard to predict because of Nintendo's new policy of holding everything close to their chest until close to release time. They could conceivably have a new Mario Party in August, and cut sales short.
Or, with the ridiculous sales of MP8 and MPDS, they could be ready to "promote" the franchise, and have fewer, higher selling entries, like they do with the bulk of their franchises, in which case MP9 might become a major holiday release for November, or even a spring or summer 2009 game, in which case MP8 could sell 1M+ more.
The price is still low IMO, Mario Party games (actually all Nintendo games) have great legs and sell really well for a long period of time. It is at > 4m right now and shows great legs in almost all countries. At least more than 5.5m for this game for sure.
This game seems to have pretty low expectations considering some of the data released recently.
NPD for 2007 has MP 8 selling 1.82M Media Create has MP 8 selling 1.15M at 01-06-08 ELSPA gave MP 8 a platinum sales award, which means the game sold more than 300k but less than 600k in the UK alone.
So that puts the game at least at 3.27M already without taking the rest of Europe, Australia and Canada into account. This should put it at least around 4M worldwide now, without a new Mario Party being announced yet. That leaves quite a lot of room for increasing its sales in the coming year and the current expectation of 4.5M seems pretty low to me.
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Based on Nintendo figure, the latest LTD of this game is 8.2 Million, while VGC # is 7.53.
we severely underpredict this game.